The real story
Subak is the cooperative system Balinese farmers have used since at least the 9th century to share water through canals, tunnels and weirs. Each subak is a community of farmers below a water source, and water temples set the schedule: when sluices open, when fields flood, when to plant. About 1,200 subak are still active, and in 2012 UNESCO listed the subak landscape as World Heritage under the philosophy of Tri Hita Karana: harmony among people, nature and the divine.
During the Green Revolution of the 1970s, farmers were pushed to plant new rice as often as possible, regardless of the temples. Water shortages and pest outbreaks followed. The anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing and the ecologist James Kremer built a computer model of the system and found that the temples' synchronized schedule struck the best balance between water and pest control. Fields fallowing at the same time starve the pests. In the 1980s, officials gave the temples their role back.
